Truth and fiction
No one willfully believes a lie. They may nonetheless either be deceived into a false belief or to reap a corporal advantage, swallow untruth for convenience over ethical considerations.
Fiction on the other hand is untruth widely adopted by culture. It has always enjoyed a place in society without the reputation of deception and arguably has laid the foundation for the world's greatest civilizations; stories can both unite and decompose a people's perception of reality by shaping the individual's inner world.
It begins in childhood. When children are brought up with books and fables, they are ignorant of fact and fiction; their undeveloped minds absorb information without discretion to a point in maturity, where better judgment is learned to sift reality from myth. Suddenly lands inhabited by anthropomorphic wells, fairies, and heroes, become childish vestiges. What remains however is rooted deep in the psyche, as ideas, feelings, and attitudes encrypted behind the subtext of images and words.
Once the person has matured, everything that he believes, in a serious and rational sense, is unquestionably factual to his self-confirming and infallible fortress, the ego; or else he would not put in the pains of believing or disbelieving anything at all. There is a complete assurance that a fact at hand is candidly true.
Just as we categorize truths, we make place in memory for untruths. Things which we've defined as falsehoods, such as the existence of Bigfoot. These two sides however, very easily become mixed and confused, given any malignant outer and inner influence.
Since humans are by nature fallible, every fact or truth we hold dear is not true. It is impossible for one to exist without believing many lies, all in good faith. Still, man persists his dogmatic predisposition towards infallibility, in himself, or through faith in a higher order (i.e. government, self-help gurus, science, academia, the new age).
These used to be the high priests in nonscientific ages. Men in colorful robes, in intricate ceremonies and hierarchies, depended upon for their social status, high flown rhetoric, and exclusive access to hidden "truths." In our secular era, we enrobe the same fashion of faith of the high priest, onto those that prevail the culture, science, academia, government, commerce, etc. with the same dogmatic fervor of the old religions.
Some traditions never change
This is the mythos, the new pantheon, which has divined nations of the post-enlightenment era. This faith that rationalism and empiricism holds all the keys to reality, is an occult and extremist movement hidden in plain sight. However, the myth runs so deep throughout academia and culture, one forgets they still swim in the same brackish water of his ancestors.
Even a hypothetical computer system, with the cumulative knowledge of humanity, and the capacity to extend that knowledge to greater depths, cannot contain every truth that can exist, because truth is not a limit to knowledge. Knowledge is a limit of truth.
Truth exists outside any logical and sensible boundary. Laws, such as that of light and gravity, are truths which have been discovered; these laws did not exist because of human observance, but in reverse have been discovered because they lie within reality.
Therefore truth exists in reality, and may be called the fabric of reality, outside the human mind. And untruths, paradoxically, exist in an inverted sense of reality, and they too are not the mind's construct, as logic cannot create anything novel beyond reality, but has the faculty to reason within its bounds; for example, imagining a blue apple, is not novel to the mind, but an inversion to an expected true reality. Thus untruths also have an existence outside human consciousness.
In short, truths are not social constructs, relativistic or arbitrarily derived cultural norms, or man-made conveniences for utilitarian benefits, but are the essence of reality which shall be and have been prior to man's short investigations into their mysteries.
The dress delusion
The truths and untruths society deals with on a day-to-day basis can be trivial. Even so, society could not function without a foundation of trust, which checks the flow of deceit from upending it altogether. Truth as a social contract is fundamental, holding the line between a healthy civilization and the fallen ruins of history.
The internet phenomenon of "The dress" shows us one example of society's propensity to distinguish truth from untruth, to meet one another eye-to-eye. Though bewildering in 2015, a photograph of a black and blue dress, caught the attention of the entire online world with wonder. Why?
Because many, sometimes the majority, of the online community claimed the dress was white and gold. This sparked fierce international debates, whether those who saw truth were illegitimate, or those who saw untruth had gone insane.
This was not due to mental incapacity, differences of color classification, confusion and panic, or color blindness. There is a deeper layer between external reality and the inner mind that meets the eye, responsible for innocuous misjudgments such as this; when a lie becomes to many an undeniable truth, it erodes not only their own right judgment, but raises doubts within those who saw the truth but felt the social pressure to join the delusional masses.
Another example is Welles' radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds. People truly acted upon the fictional story with belief and faith that the earth was under attack by aliens. Why? What forces could lead, competent, sane minds into wild panic and frenzy? The same reason religions sacrificed newborns in flaming bronze bulls. The same reason people line up for the same old new phone model or pharma drug. The same reason citizens line up to pick their leaders.
Because they believe the grand myth-makers, the voices in the sky. Those tall tales over radio frequencies, by news anchors, by government officials. They deliver the programming to invoke fear and desire, and the masses go into a frenzy to keep up with ever shifting cultural norms.
This is psychological infiltration, by the psychologist, neuroscientist, sociologist, state, and finance racketeers. They stand to gain from misinformation, from inversion of truth, from creating false paradigms throughout the world.
Therefore, if the public has no basis to distinguish truth and untruth, as we're told, that everything is relative, nothing objective, those who monopolize the microphone, control the grand delusions of the past, present, and future.
The fundamentality of truth in reality
This was quite excellent, though I have some issues with the ending:
> Therefore, if the public has no basis to distinguish truth and untruth, as we're told, that everything is relative, nothing objective, those who monopolize the microphone, control the grand delusions of the past, present, and future.